A blog sharing information about materials presented to children on climate, highlighting those intended to frighten or mislead, and those which seek to inform and inspire rather than to recruit, even the very young, for an ill-founded political campaign around the threat of CAGW. A campaign which is irresponsible, destructive, divisive, and degrading.

'First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial.'

Friday, 19 September 2014

Inspiration for the Climate Teacher: a call for compassion for the world's poor

As a non-believer, but nevertheless a great admirer of Christianity, I have been puzzled by the number of evangelical Christians who are prominent in the promotion of alarm over our impact on the climate. Names that come immediately to mind are John Houghton, Bill McKibben, Katharine Hayhoe, and John Cook. Puzzled because raising alarm with the scope and scale of CAGW is a shockingly irresponsible thing to do when the case for it is so weak and so speculative, and the policy consequences emerging from it are so dreadful for people and the environment all over the world.

As
the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and
faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust,
resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and
its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to
some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise
design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more
likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to
respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify
it catastrophically.

Earth’s
temperature naturally warms and cools cyclically throughout time,
and warmer periods are typically more conducive to human thriving
than colder periods.

While
human addition of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide
(CO2),
to the atmosphere may slightly raise atmospheric temperatures,
observational studies indicate that the climate system responds more
in ways that suppress than in ways that amplify CO2’s
effect on temperature, implying a relatively small and benign rather
than large and dangerous warming effect.

Empirical
studies indicate that natural cycles outweigh human influences in
producing the cycles of global warming and cooling, not only in the
distant past but also recently.

Computer
climate models, over 95% of which point toward greater warming than
has been observed during the period of rapid CO2 increase,
do not justify belief that human influences have come to outweigh
natural influences, or fears that human-caused warming will be large
and dangerous.

Rising
atmospheric CO2 benefits
all life on Earth by improving plant growth and crop yields, making
food more abundant and affordable, helping the poor most of all.

Abundant,
affordable, reliable energy, most of it now and in the foreseeable
future provided by burning fossil fuels, which are the primary
source of CO2 emissions,
is indispensable to lifting and keeping people out of poverty.

Mandatory
reductions in CO2 emissions,
pursued to prevent dangerous global warming, would have little or no
discernible impact on global temperatures, but would greatly
increase the price of energy and therefore of everything else. Such
policies would put more people at greater risk than the warming they
are intended to prevent, because they would slow, stop, or even
reverse the economic growth that enables people to adapt to all
climates. They would also harm the poor more than the wealthy, and
would harm them more than the small amount of warming they might
prevent.

In
developed countries, the poor spend a higher percentage of their
income on energy than others, so rising energy prices, driven by
mandated shifts from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to
diffuse, expensive, intermittent “Green” energy, will in effect
be regressive taxes—taxing the poor at higher rates than the rich.

In
developing countries, billions of the poor desperately need to
replace dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, pollution from
which causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and about 4 million
premature deaths every year, mostly among women and young children.
To demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and
depend on expensive wind, solar, and other “Green” fuels to meet
that need is to condemn them to more generations of poverty and the
high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it.

The
first point above is a bit too mystical for my tastes, but it is
gentle and positive, and I imagine people of many other faiths could
go along with it. The other 9 points deserve to be studied by anyone
who teaches climate topics to schoolchildren, with a view to finding
ways to get these key insights across to them.

The
statement continues with direct appeals to Christians to take
actions, and this is less suited to general teaching except perhaps
for discussion with senior pupils. Here, on the other hand, is another Christian leader urging his flock to join the march in New York next week, a march intended to produce even more destructive and dreadful policies ostensibly based on overblown fears about our carbon dioxide: http://blog.archny.org/index.php/peoples-climate-march/comment-page-1/

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Observed and Expected Temperatures

Scafetta Model
This displays a forecast made by Scafetta using a simple model combining various cycles which have been observed in temperatures, together with some 'adjustment for global warming'. His forecast has the light blue background. An IPCC 2007 'projection' is shown with a green background. The bold red-then-blue line is the HadCRUT calculation of a global mean temperature, with blue line connecting the most recent results. (Source: Tallbloke's blog). A 2016 paper by Scafetta: http://www.iieta.org/sites/default/files/Journals/HTECH/IJHT.34.S2_35.pdf